CNN
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House Speaker Mike Johnson formally unveiled plans on Saturday for a government funding stopgap through September 30 — a measure intended to stave off a potential March 14 shutdown and buy time for President Donald Trump and GOP leaders to steer key pieces of his agenda through Congress this summer.
The president himself has been highly supportive of the measure, which includes some cuts to domestic spending programs that Democrats will likely oppose. GOP leadership aides said Saturday that it would increase defense spending by about $6 billion while domestic spending would drop by about $13 billion.
And while GOP leadership aides stressed that the plan includes no partisan policy add-ons, it does include certain White House funding requests, like some new money intended to help carry out additional deportations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
But in an ominous sign for Congress’s ability to stave off a shutdown next week, Senate Democrats’ top spending negotiator quickly panned the GOP’s plan.
“Speaker Johnson has rolled out a slush fund continuing resolution that would give Donald Trump and Elon Musk more power over federal spending—and more power to pick winners and losers, which threatens families in blue and red states alike,” Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington, said in a statement Saturday.
House GOP leaders believe the plan is on track to pass the House, arguing that Trump’s backing will help them win robust support among House Republicans on the floor this week, even as many ultraconservatives typically loathe such stopgap measures. Johnson hopes to hold the vote Tuesday on the 99-page bill, according to people familiar with the plans.
“It is quite literally as clean a CR as you can draft,” a House GOP leadership aide said Saturday, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has strongly opposed the measure — preferring a long-term negotiated deal — and said Johnson and his GOP will need to pass it on their own. But a small number of House Democrats have privately discussed in recent days whether they should support the bill.
“If Republicans decide to take this approach, as Speaker Johnson indicated, it’s his expectation that Republicans are going it alone,” Jeffries told reporters Friday, ahead of the bill release.
Asked afterward if he believed Johnson could pull off the government funding vote next week, Jeffries was blunt: “No.”
If the short-term funding measure passes the House this week as Johnson expects, it will put immense pressure on Senate Democrats to go along with the same plan.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and his leadership team have, too, said they want negotiations to continue instead of pursuing a long-term stopgap. But it’s not clear how forcefully Schumer and his team will push their Senate Democrats to oppose the bill if it makes it to the Senate.
“No, I will not support that,” Sen. Patty Murray, the Senate Democrats’ top spending negotiator, told CNN last week when asked about the House GOP bill. Asked if enough Democrats would support the bill to allow it to pass the Senate, she answered: “I am not going to speculate.”
Johnson and Trump have described the bill as a so-called “clean” stopgap bill — noting that it doesn’t include language to enshrine certain Trump priorities, such as DOGE cuts. But Democrats argue that this kind of long-term stopgap bill lacks critical language that is contained in full-year negotiated bills that would make it easier for their party to put a check on Trump in court, if needed.
Republicans acknowledged that the stopgap would give the White House more authority to spend as it chooses — a flexibility that GOP leadership aides described as necessary when Congress’s spending is put on autopilot for another seven months.
“I believe we’ll pass it along party lines, but I think every Democrat should vote for the CR,” Johnson told reporters on Friday. “A clean CR with a few minor anomalies is not something they should vote against.”
CNN’s Veronica Stracqualursi contributed to this report.
